The Fence - Dick Lehr [103]
Williams put his foot down. “No, I did not.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“I’m positive of that.”
“Absolutely sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Williams explained Craig had misheard him. Sure, he’d brought up Burgio’s name with Craig, but only to refute rumors already circulating in the immediate aftermath of the beating. He’d told Craig that Burgio could not have hit Mike because “he was with me.” Burgio, he said, had run after Ronald “Boogie-Down” Tinsley, the other suspect who’d fled from the right side of the Lexus. Williams said he’d seen Burgio get out of the car. “When I turned around, when I had my suspect, he was there.” Williams said Craig had misunderstood and twisted his words all around. He was actually vouching for Burgio.
Finally, Williams exhibited an impressive inability to identify any of the other officers at the dead end, despite Peabody’s repeated efforts. He was comfortable discussing cops whose presence was widely acknowledged—Craig Jones, Joe Teahan, and Ian Daley, for example—but was stumped when it came naming any others.
“There were other cops there,” he acknowledged.
“Did you know any of them?” Peabody asked.
“I can’t recall exactly who was there.”
Williams certainly appreciated the benefits of cops sticking together. In October he’d gotten word in one of the two excessive force complaints pending against him—he’d been exonerated. In the Internal Affairs inquiry, every other officer had backed his position that he’d struck the Dorchester woman only after she’d assaulted him. The eleven officers interviewed by IA either said they did not see Williams hit the woman or said that Williams restrained the complainant only after she had hit him. “Officer Williams was met with physical resistance while making a lawful arrest and used the minimum amount of force necessary to subdue Miss June Ivey,” ruled the investigator for Internal Affairs.
By the time he was finished questioning Dave Williams, Peabody was deflated.
“Is there any information, Officer Williams, that you can give this grand jury that would assist them in determining what had happened to Michael Cox that night?”
“Just what I told you,” replied Williams.
It was a command performance by an officer who, in the hours after the beating, had likely said too much and was now explaining it all away to return to the police fold.
While Bob Peabody was pursuing his grand jury probe into the Cox beating during the fall, New York’s new police commissioner—the brash and high-profile Bill Bratton—was holding forth at Harvard Law School. Bratton, the ex–Boston police commissioner who’d once gone on a ride-along with Mike and Craig, had agreed to be the keynote speaker at a forum titled “Police, Lawyers, and the Truth: A Symposium.” Bratton was called on to address the problem of cops lying to make an arrest or while testifying at criminal trials.
The police perjury, nicknamed “testilying,” was believed to be a by-product of the stand-together police culture that was responsible as well for the blue wall of silence. They were, in effect, branches of the same tree. With testilying, cops lied usually to protect a case and ensure a conviction. With the police code of silence, cops lied to protect another cop suspected of wrongdoing. In both, it was all about us versus them.
“You cannot break the law to enforce it,” Bratton began.
Testilying had moved front and center into the national dialogue, a hot public issue for much of the year due to the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Allegations of misconduct and perjury by the Los Angeles police were a centerpiece of Simpson’s defense. With more than 150 million viewers watching the televised verdict,